Articles

Person taking a sticky note with testing activities on it off a backlog wall Tackling Testing Challenges in an Agile Transition

Even though jumping onto the agile bandwagon is tempting for businesses, it is not always easy, and a transition to agile is likely to come with a slew of challenges for testing in particular. In order for agile to enable delivery of quality products at speed, testing has to begin much earlier in the process than ever before. Enabling certain practices will help your organization achieve a more successful transition to agile testing.

Hemanth Yamjala's picture Hemanth Yamjala
Developers and testers giving each other useful feedback Improve Tester-Developer Relationships with Helpful Feedback

Testers and developers often have a strained relationship. Each side has a certain level of expectations as to what the other side should know and do, while there is little understanding of the constraints, conditions, and requirements that the other team has to work within. But it does not have to be this way. A little effort in giving more specific and helpful feedback can go a long way toward improving attitudes.

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl
Hand holding black rotary telephone When DevOps Gets Lost in Translation

The waterfall method of developing software is a bunch of translation activities: The design is a translation of the requirements into the language of architecture, the code is another, and a formal test process is a third. And with each translation, there’s the opportunity to introduce error. When your DevOps team is isolated, it creates another handoff, and another point of failure.

Matthew Heusser's picture Matthew Heusser
Racecar on a track Test Faster: How We Cut Our Test Cycle Time in Half

In just a year, one test team reduced its test cycle by more than 50 percent. It took analysis, planning, and effort—first they looked into how they spent their time, and then they questioned whether they could reduce time in any of those areas. Once they knew where they could be more efficient, they could start tackling their blockers. Here's how you can, too.

John Ruberto's picture John Ruberto
Identical bugs under a magnifying glass When Testers Should Consider a Bug a Duplicate

When can a bug report be considered redundant because it is already reported in the bug management system? If you ask the developers, if two bugs are caused by the same mistake in the code, it’s enough to report one of them. But Michael Stahl has good arguments from a tester's perspective about why it's better to err on the side of over-reporting bugs.

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl
Requirements model Requirements Mapping Using Business Function Test Suites

On this team, testers were overcommitted, avoidable defects were surfacing, and documentation was hard to find. Worse, trust and morale were low. Upgrading tools was out of the question, so the testers decided to take matters into their own hands and create incremental change themselves. Here's how a team added a new type of traceability to its requirement test case world.

Balazs Schaffhauser's picture Balazs Schaffhauser
Image of lock over code DevSecOps: Incorporate Security into DevOps to Reduce Software Risk

DevSecOps is a growing movement to incorporate security into DevOps practices in order to ensure flaws and weaknesses are exposed early on through monitoring, assessment, and analysis, so remediation can be implemented far earlier than traditional efforts. By failing fast with security testing, organizations reduce risk of a security incident and decrease the cost of rework.

Alan Crouch's picture Alan Crouch
Data servers 7 Steps to Improving Your Data Testing

When you have tens of thousands of rows of data, how do you know what to test or how much to test? A set percentage? Random test cases? When do you stop testing? It can be overwhelming. Here are seven steps to help your team streamline their data testing efforts and know what to test, how much to test, and when to stop testing.

Karis Hathaway's picture Karis Hathaway
Pencil to paper Document Why as Well as What: Finding the Purpose of Your Software

Code can express what we want to accomplish, but it’s a little more difficult to express why we’re doing something in the first place. The people who maintain code are often not those who originally wrote it, so documenting why helps set a context and gives clues as to what the author was thinking when they came up with a particular design, making developers' jobs easier.

David Bernstein's picture David Bernstein
Icon showing one end to another Endgame Testing: Exploring Your Agile Product End to End

The main goal of endgame testing is to test the system end to end from the user's perspective. This should ensure continuity between components developed by different teams, continuity in user experience, and successful integration of new features. Endgame testing will often identify gaps that are difficult to discover inside agile teams, including flows across the product.

Doron Bar's picture Doron Bar

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